Special Events and Programs

 

Concert goers at Saratoga National Historical Park.

NPS Photo

October

Fall Lecture Series
Inheriting the Revolution: Antebellum African American Pathways in Saratoga County

Thursday, October 24
6:30 pm
Visitor Center

How did the American Revolution affect African Americans in Old Saratoga, Saratoga Springs, and their environs? This talk is inspired by historian Joyce Appleby's focus on the first post-Revolutionary War generation and seeks to place Black people within that cohort. By focusing on a few individuals, it will highlight the major avenues they pursued in the early national period and in the years prior to the Civil War. Reservations are required. Email us to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

Dr. Myra Armstead is the Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies Emerita at Bard College. She received her doctorate in History from the University of Chicago where she interned under the late Dr. John Hope Franklin and concentrated in three fields—U.S. urban history, U.S. diplomatic history, and African colonial history. She holds a Masters in International Relations with a concentration in African Affairs from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelors from Cornell University where she majored in Government. She has published widely on topics relating to African American social and cultural life, including the recently completed Historic Resource Study for Saratoga National Historical Park: Memory and Enslavement: Schuyler House, Old Saratoga, and the Saratoga Patent in History, Historical Practice, and Historical Imagination.

The Fall Lecture Series is presented with support from the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

Saratoga Sunrise Photography Event

Thursday, October 31 and Saturday, November 2
7:00 am
Visitor Center Lawn

Want to appreciate the beauty of one of the last later sunrises of the year before the time change? Join Park Volunteer and Photographer David Truland and Park Ranger Kristin Vinduska to welcome a new day at the Saratoga National Historical Park Visitor Center Lawn on Oct 31 or Nov 2 at 7:00 am. Exchange photography tips and experience the beautiful fall scenery highlighted in the day's first golden light. This time of year is especially photogenic because of the fog that blankets the Hudson River first thing in the morning.

Fall Lecture Series
Picturing History: A Primer for the Better Understanding of Fine Art during the Era of the American Revolution

Thursday, October 31
6:30 pm
Visitor Center

Although there are signs of change, historians have traditionally shown surprisingly little interest in the artworks related to their periods of study. This is not to say that artworks are ignored - history books are often replete with period pictures meant to showcase the themes discussed in print. Unfortunately, however, these artworks are often poorly chosen or are little more than an afterthought. Ranger Eric Schnitzer will explore the different forms of 2-dimentional 18th century artwork media, spur awareness of pitfalls, and investigate shocking deceptions related to Revolutionary War drawings and paintings. Reservations are required. Email us to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

Eric Schnitzer is a park ranger at Saratoga National Historical Park.

The Fall Lecture Series is presented with support from the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

November

Fall Lecture Series
General Washington’s War Time Cooks

Thursday, November 7
6:30 pm
Visitor Center

Although there is only one “Washington’s Headquarters” in New York, there are numerous signs around the region stating, “Washington slept here.” Which means he also ate there. But typically, not food prepared by the household’s cook, but by his own staff, led by Hannah Till, an enslaved woman, and her husband Isaac. Who were they? What skills may they have had? Join us as we look at current research on Hannah & Isaac and ponder what it may have been like to travel and cook around the region for Washington. Reservations are required. Email us to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

Speaker Lavada Nahon is a culinary historian with 30 years public history experience. She focuses on New Netherland and New York, 17th through 19th centuries, specifically, the lives and cultures of Africans and their descendants, enslaved and free. Lavada is also the first Interpreter of African American History for New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Bureau of Historic Sites. A position she has held for five years. She has worked for a wide variety of historic sites and organizations around the tri-state region, and is a noted and recently retired, hearth cook and teacher. Her mission is to bring history to life by giving presence to the Africans and people of African descent enslaved and free, in New Netherland and New York in whatever way possible.

The Fall Lecture Series is presented with support from the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

Veterans Day Commemoration and Family Fun Day

Saturday, November 9
10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Visitor Center

Join us as we honor the veterans of our armed services! At 10:00 am, we will hold a ceremony honoring those who have served from the earliest American veterans in the Revolutionary War to today. This short ceremony will include speakers and a moment to remember those who are no longer with us.

Following the ceremony, representatives of veteran’s services, organizations, and local military units will be on hand to provide information and celebrate. Refreshments and family friendly activities will continue until 2:00 pm. Veterans can also pick up their free lifetime passes to federal public lands by bringing a veteran marked driver’s license or ID.

This program is presented in partnership with the Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the American Revolution, Military order of the World Wars, Theodore Roosevelt Chapter (New York), and Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

Fall Lecture Series
From the Battlefield to the Stage: The Many Lives of General John Burgoyne

Thursday, November 14
6:30 pm
Visitor Center

Norman S. Poser speaks on his recently published book, From the Battlefield to the Stage: The Many Lives of General John Burgoyne. Burgoyne is chiefly known to history for surrendering his army to the American forces at Saratoga in 1777, an event that turned out to be a turning point in the Revolutionary War. Both on and off the battlefield, Burgoyne led an action-packed life: as a young man, he eloped with the daughter of an English earl; a devotee of the theatre, he wrote plays that were successfully produced on the London stage; a Member of Parliament for thirty years, he fought corruption in India and advocated religious toleration; he was welcome in London’s elite gambling clubs and fashionable drawing rooms. One hundred years after Burgoyne’s death, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, impressed by his versatile talents and humane character, gave him the apt nickname of “Gentleman Johnny.” It has stuck. Reservations are required. Email us to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

In addition to his biography of John Burgoyne, Norman S. Poser is the author of two other non-fiction books about eighteenth-century England: a biography of the great judge, Lord Mansfield; and a book about the London stage in the time of the actor and theatre manager David Garrick. A retired law professor, Poser lives with his wife, Judy Cohn, in New York City.

The Fall Lecture Series is presented with support from the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.

Fall Lecture Series
The Compleat Victory: Leadership and Strategy in the Saratoga Campaign of 1777

Tuesday, November 19
6:30 pm
Visitor Center

In the late summer and fall of 1777, after two years of indecisive fighting, the outcome of the American War of Independence hung in the balance. Having successfully expelled the Americans from Canada in 1776, the British were determined to end the rebellion and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy: sending General John Burgoyne south to rout the Americans and take Albany.

When British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga on New York’s Lake Champlain with unexpected ease in July of 1777, it looked as if it was a matter of time before they would break the rebellion in the North. Less than three and a half months later, however, a combination of the Continental Army and militia forces commanded by Major General Horatio Gates and inspired by the heroics of Benedict Arnold, forced Burgoyne to surrender his entire army. The American victory at Saratoga—described by one Patriot general as "the Compleat Victory"—stunned the world and changed the course of the war. In the end, British plans were undone by a combination of faulty military strategy and superior American leadership. Weddle will discuss the two themes from one of the most pivotal events in US history. Reservations are required. Email us to reserve your spot! Please include the date of the program you wish to attend.

Colonel (Ret.) Kevin Weddle, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Fellow and the former Elihu Root Cahir of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served over 28 years as a combat engineer officer. Throughout his career he worked in a variety of command and staff positions in the United States and overseas including command of a combat engineer battalion, operations officer for a combat engineer group, and assignments at the Pentagon, West Point, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is also a veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and Operation Enduring Freedom.

He leads military and civilian groups on tours and staff rides of battlefields in the United States and Europe, including Gettysburg, Antietam, Normandy, Sicily, Anzio, Gallipoli, Waterloo, Agincourt, and others. In 2019, he served as the William L. Garwood visiting professor at Princeton University and has won several teaching awards.

Colonel Weddle holds master’s degrees in history and civil engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He is the author of Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral: The Life of Samuel Francis Du Pont (University of Virginia Press, 2005), and appeared as an on-air expert in the 2020 History Channel documentary “Washington.” His second book, The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, the Society of the Cincinnati Prize, the Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania with his wife, Jeanie.

The Fall Lecture Series is presented with support from the Friends of Saratoga Battlefield.